When We Were Young
by Amelia Elizabeth
Summary: Part Five in the "Jon and Erika" series. Jon, Erika, Adalie, Frankie and Ben are on Andoria while Jon is serving as Ambassador. A series of sweet moments with the children interwoven with Jon and Erika's memories of the NX project.
1. Chapter 1 - Ben and Reactor Tests

When We Were Young

Part Five in the "Jon and Erika" series. Jon, Erika, Adalie, Frankie and Ben are on Andoria while Jon is serving as Ambassador. A series of sweet moments with the children interwoven with Jon and Erika's memories of the NX project.

Chapter 1 – Ben, FTL and Reactor Tests

A/N: Hi all, its been a long time (insert pun here) but I've finally started to put together the fifth and final part of the saga. It combines stories of the NX project with sweet moments with the three Archer kids. I'm probably taking a lot of liberties with the canon but bear with me. Hope you enjoy and please review! As always, I don't own them because if I did things would have turned out just like this. - Amelia

###

"Ben. You've got to stop jumping on the bed and go to sleep."

"Why?"

"Ben…"

"Why?"

"Jumping boy, hit the deck!" Ben landed on his bed with a thud. Jon tried not to smile as Ben looked up at him cautiously. All his kids knew 'that voice.' It was his captain's voice and he only used it when he really had exhausted all his other options. And tonight as he tried to get his three-year-old son into bed, Jon figured he had definitely exhausted all his other options.

"Lay down flat on your back and I'll tuck you in. Stop wriggling around little man or we're going to have to strap you down."

"Why?"

"So you don't fly off into space."

Ben looked puzzled as he watched his father fold down the covers. "Back in the old days, long before you were born or even I was born, our ships didn't have artificial gravity."

"Gravity," Ben repeated the word as if he understood. His most recent jumping off the roof experiment with his sisters proved just how little he understood the concept.

"Now gravity is what keeps you on the ground. If it is too strong, you can get smooshed to the floor." Jon dropped to the ground dramatically and lay flat while Ben peered over the edge of the bed, laughing at his father's antics. "But," Jon said hopping up, "if it isn't strong enough, you'll float up to the ceiling like this…" he started to stand up as if he was being pulled up to the sky, but before he got to his full height, Ben grabbed one of his hands and pulled him down again.

"Stay!" Ben commanded.

"Well, that's the idea. But back in the day, they didn't have it so when you slept, they had to strap you to the your bed or else you'd float away. And then you'd never get any sleep."

"Never!" Ben shook his head emphatically.

"But, you've also got to remember that ships couldn't go very fast back then. It might take you years to get across a solar system. So you'd go to sleep and when you'd wake up, your ship would be at your new home."

Ben was starting to lose interest in stellar history, but Jon didn't really care. Maybe stories about sleeper ships would be boring enough to put his toddler to sleep. Maybe if he kept mentioning the word sleep.

Sleeper ships had always fascinated Jon. They represented a moment in time where humanity's desire to explore space far outpaced their technological development. They were so desperate to see what was out there that they built ships that couldn't go faster than the speed of light, put everyone into cryofreeze, except for a sorry few who had to keep the ship going on their own, just for the chance to wake up years later and colonize a harsh new planet.

He had seen other civilizations where it had been necessity, not a curiosity that had driven them to take to the stars. Worlds choked by pollution or contamination, devastated by war or simply over populated had forced people to board starships barely worthy of the name. Despite the difficult conditions of slow engines, recycled air, and not enough supplies, these cultures had survived. But humans on the other had had thrived.

His people had gone through all of that by choice. They wanted to explore and they wanted to colonize. To them, it didn't matter how long it took to get there, it was the fact that they were even going at all that made it exciting. They were true pioneers.

By the time Jon had joined the fleet, the journey had become something more manageable, something to be accomplished in months, rather than years. The invention of the warp drive meant that instead of sending ships out on one-way colonization missions, there could be two-way transit for the first time in Earth's space history. Trade between Earth and her colonies developed as space lanes began to form. Starfleet was created out of the older space organizations to help patrol those lanes and continue exploring, but once again, ambition outpaced technology. Warp speed was fast, but no one was able to create an engine that could break the warp two barrier. Until his father came along. The world was a different place after that.

Ben held his hand tightly and Jon knew the drill. He had to wait and wait and wait and wait for the little guy to fall asleep.

"Dad?"

"Yes, buddy?"

"Will I wake up in a new solar system?"

"Not likely. We're already in a new one. You are one of the first human children to live on this planet in this solar system. I think that is pretty special."

"Me too."

"Special enough to go to sleep?"

"Maybe."

Jon sighed and sat down to wait.

###

The absolute most boring part of his job was turning on a reactor and waiting; waiting to see if it was still going strong in three hours. Of course, he couldn't leave and come back in three hours. No, there was a chance the reactor would blow up and if he didn't get the exact readings, several engineers might actually kill him. If he didn't get blown up by the reactor as well. But really the chances of all that were slim. Or so he kept telling himself as he nervously eyed the scram switch.

One of the first things they had to be able to do before the test flights was prove that the warp engine was safe to run for hours on end. They couldn't even do efficiency testing until they had done this. So they dragged the reactor up to the spacedocks, evacuated everyone but the essential personnel and the idiots dumb enough to volunteer for this important mission and flipped the switch. It had been pretty epic.

A crumpled up piece of paper hit him square in the forehead, reminding him that he wasn't alone in this unique form of torture. There was someone else up here, but he had the attention span of a three year old. Jon sighed and reached down to pick up the piece of paper AG had thrown at him. He unfolded it and smoothed out the creases.

"Looks like a flowchart," Jon said looking it over.

"That's because you are holding it upside down."

"It still looks like a flow chart."

"It's a command chart. Once we finally get the go to strap this thing to a cockpit, we're going to need some procedures."

"Procedures?" Jon asked.

"Yeah, like who gets to talk to the pilot, order of operations for checklists, take off procedures, final authority to scram a flight or abort a flight, pyro charge control for out of control craft, what we call the folks on the ground, you name it."

"I thought we'd just call them Houston."

"They're in California. Jon, as much as it pains me to say this to you, your daddy's engine isn't the end-all-be-all of this program. Once we know it works…"

"It does."

"Once we know, we've got 30,000 more problems to solve."

"And you're gonna solve them?"

"I'm bored."

"Well, this is better than some of the other things you do when you are bored." Jon looked closer at the paper. "Capcom? That's straight out of NASA, isn't it?"

"Yeah, one guy to talk to the pilot. So you don't have a million people shouting orders at once."

"And it'll be one of the other pilots?"

"The only person who can understand what is going on in the mind of a pilot is another pilot. The only person I want shouting orders at me while I'm flying faster than the speed of light is someone who has flown a ship faster than the speed of light."

"What about Erika?"

"Okay, Erika or another pilot. No one else. Not any of those science types. They couldn't fly a barge on autopilot."

"You know, Erika's been talking to me about this for a while. She wants the control people on the ground to have active telemetry links and control over what we are doing."

"What we are doing or what you are doing?"

"Hey!"

"Well, if we all flew like you, I'd want someone in control on the ground too."

"Thanks, AG."

 _Beep._

"What was that?"

"Timer. Three hours are up."

"Thank god. Log the readings then standby for shut down."

They had made it to three hours. Next time it would be six. And next time, he wouldn't sign up to babysit a warp reactor.

###

Jon looked up, shaking the memory, only to realize that Ben was staring back at him, wide-awake.

"I see you aren't asleep yet," Jon muttered.

"Nope."

"Are you going to make me wait here all night?"

"Maybe."

Jon groaned and put his head in his hands theatrically. Ben laughed at his father's display.

"Well, while we are waiting for you to decide that sleep is something worthwhile, would you like to hear a story about when AG and I had to wait for a reactor test?"

Ben nodded, resting his head down on the pillow.

"Okay then. Here goes."

###


	2. Chapter 2 - Ben and Packing

Chapter 2 - Ben, Packing in a Bucket and Old Outposts

A/N: I'm playing around with the format of weaving the two eras together so let me know what you like the best. As always, please read and review! - AE

###

"Think you got enough bags, AG?" Jon asked with his hands folded across his chest. He watched as his copilot lugged three large duffle bags into the cargo hold of the shuttle ferrying them up to the spacedock.

"I was thinking since we'll be there for a couple days, might as well pack some sightseeing clothes. We could go out to eat, take in a few shows…" AG reached up and slapped Jon on the back of the head. "These aren't full of clothes, you idiot. These are full of spare parts, survival gear…"

"A spare engine…"

"You laugh, but these outposts don't have much. Don't come running to me when you don't have a spanner."

"No, I'll just beat you up and take yours," Jon said as he settled into one of the passenger seats. He hated travelling as a passenger. He glanced over at the shuttle controls, eager to hop in the cockpit and take the reins. It had been so long since any of them had gotten to do any real flying. Nowadays it seemed as though they were in some hellish world of nonstop simulations. They had proven the engine worked; now they had to prove it would work upside down or in the rain or in a remote god forsaken corner of space far from anything that mattered. Or at least that was what Forrest had told them when he gave him his orders.

That was why they were crapped into this boxy old shuttle to begin with. Someone had thought it would be brilliant to test whether two warp five engines could operate in the same vicinity. Jon's jaw had dropped when he saw the mission profile. Of course two ships could be in the same part of space at the same time. Every single ship since the Phoenix had proven that. But the powers that be had long ago declared that a set of staged tests involving two engines and overlapping areas of operation was a part of the process for developing a new ship. And because someone thought there was the slightest chance those two ships might blow themselves and half the sector to hell, the test was being conducted as far away from established settlements as possible.

"Why is that the two of us always end up with the stupidest missions that involve everyone nearby being evacuated in case we blow up? Why can't Rob and Sam ever get blown up?" AG asked.

"Because Rob and Sam actually understand the technology that you and I usually break," Jon answered with a laugh.

"Hey!"

"If the program loses the two of them, they're in trouble. If we die, Forrest's blood pressure goes down."

That was true enough, Jon thought as he said it. While he understood his father's engine and he understood how the buttons he pressed while strapped in the cockpit of one of the jet-like prototypes affected the engine, he always felt as if he was missing an incredible amount of knowledge. The ships were infinitely complex and were constantly being added to and modified. By the time they would be ready to even start building an actual ship, there would be so much more that Jon could barely keep up with. Sam could though, and Jon envied the older pilot for that. Rob could as well and AG didn't even bother trying. If you talked to him about technical garbage too much he'd start shouting at you until you stopped. But that didn't stop him from bringing every single piece of machinery he could fit in his bags with him just in case he somehow managed to find the exact right one that could fix whatever problem they had gotten themselves into this time.

"Well then why is Erika coming?" AG countered. "If we lose her, then we're all screwed." Erika understood the basics of the technology but she also understood the people who operated it. She could translate what the engineers were saying to the pilots and put what the pilots were saying back into the technical language. She was the peacemaker between departments, always able to see the big picture when tensions flared. She was calm and organized which was something he would never be.

"Jon, Starfleet knew that if you got your ass killed out here she'd come and kill them all. Better to let her get blown up right along with you."

"Aww, Rike," Jon smiled as Erika climbed into the seat beside him, "I didn't know they cared."

"Cared about what?" Erika asked, clearly annoyed.

"Nothing," Jon muttered as he strapped himself in.

"Come on, let's get this show on the road or does no one up front remember how to fly one of these things?" AG yelled as the engines began to rev up.

###

"C'mon, buddy, you've got to go to sleep."

"Why?"

Jon groaned internally. "Because tomorrow's a big day."

"Why?"

"Because we are going on vacation."

"Why?"

Eventually they would come to a question that couldn't be answered with a why, he hoped. "Because we haven't seen your grandma or Uncle Simon and Aunt Maria and the girls in a long time."

"Why?"

"Because they are on Earth and we are out here."

"Why?" Ben started to smile. He knew this was annoying his father. Erika had stopped responding long ago but Jon tried to come up with some sort of answer to keep his toddler occupied. It was better than Veronica who flat out made things up just to get Ben to stop. Maybe that was why his son believed that he could jump off a roof without any consequences. Or rather, maybe Veronica was why his sisters even convinced him that it was possible.

Jon sighed and tried switching gears. "Are you all packed?"

Ben nodded eagerly.

"Did you pack a suitcase?"

"No, a bucket."

Jon thought he must have misheard but Ben was pointing over at his big red bucket, which looked to be stuffed with what had formerly been the contents of his suitcase. Now Jon really did groan. Apparently his son belonged to the AG Robinson school of packing.

"Did you pack that all by yourself?"

"Yup."

"Awesome." Jon added sorting through the bucket and getting it back into its proper location to his ever-growing list of tasks he had to complete before he could go to bed. He hadn't thought that leaving the embassy for a few weeks would cause so much extra work, but as the date of their return to Earth neared, the work began to pile up, just like the clothes that Erika had painstakingly laid out for him to pack in his own suitcase. Even after all these years of travel he still was a terrible packer. He only survived most of his early away missions because someone else on the trip had thought to pack almost everything he had forgotten. And with a little bribery or a promise to buy another round of drinks at whatever bar they had found, AG usually offered to share.

"Am I going to have to tell you another story to get you to fall asleep?"

"And then I still might not fall asleep!"

"Ben!"

"Are either of you any closer to going to bed?" Jon turned to see his wife waiting in the doorway, her arms crossed and a small frown on her face.

"Hopefully," Jon muttered, looking back at his son.

"Well, don't take all night. Someone still has a lot of packing to do," Erika gave Jon a look then walked away.

"Do you need to pack in my bucket?" Ben offered.

"Ah, no," Jon said as he scooped his son up in his arms and laid him down on the bed. "You know, we had to do a lot of packing back when we were testing the ship," he said, pulling the blankets around his boy. "Every time we were sent to a remote base, we had to pack everything we could possibly think of because you never knew what we weren't going to be able to find. Things were pretty rugged back then. If you didn't carry what you needed, chances were no one else was going to have it."

###


	3. Chapter 3 - Ben and Breaking the Barrier

Chapter 3 – Ben and Breaking the Barrier

Erika leaned against the doorframe and looked into Ben's room again. Jon was still there, laying on the bed with him, looking half asleep himself. She had been helping the girls finish packing for their trip before getting each of them off to bed. Each time she walked past her son's bedroom, she poked her head in to see if her husband had made any progress.

"Dad?" Ben asked softly looking up at his father.

"Yeah buddy?" Jon murmured, his eyes catching Erika as she watched them.

"You and Mom are special, aren't you?"

"What do you mean by that?" Jon asked as Erika folded her arms across this chest. She remembered having this conversation with both of their girls, explaining that it wasn't normal for the most important people on the planet to stop by someone's home for dinner or for photographers to follow their family constantly. She hadn't wanted their children to think that they were different from everyone else because when it came down to it, they weren't. They had two parents that loved them, a sweet beagle puppy that had accompanied them to Andoria, and a home that never seemed large enough for three growing children. It wasn't until Adalie came home from school one day asking why there were pictures of her parents in her textbooks that she and Jon figured they needed to find a way to explain all this to their children. Adalie had taken it all well, but Frankie had asked for a new family that wasn't so "weird." Ben was still struggling with it. His sisters told him all sorts of things, and half of what came out of Frankie's mouth was a wild exaggeration but he was getting old enough where he was beginning to wonder why his parents were the most important people in every room they walked into.

And then they had moved. They had moved halfway across the quadrant to a frozen planet with very few humans and absolutely nothing familiar to the three children. None of them had had any experience living off planet or even away from San Francisco and suddenly they were out in the middle of nowhere. They all took it in stride though. Having the embassy staff and their children close by helped with the isolation and her children were getting to experience things that no one else had ever even dreamed of but still Erika wondered how they would come to understand this period of their lives when they grew up. She and Jon tried to maintain a sense of stability and continuity in their lives, which was why her husband had painstakingly shipped most of their furniture across the spacelanes. And that was why it was so important that they were all getting the chance to go back to Earth, even if it was only for a little while.

Technically, it was a work trip. Jon needed to brief the council on Andorian relations and Erika was getting to meet her new group of fleet commanders that were due to be deployed under her command in the coming months. But they were going to see her family and his, and they were going to visit the beach and finally feel the sun again after so long. Erika shook her head, reminding herself that none of her kids seemed to mind the cold, having inherited their father's ability to tough out most weather conditions. She wrapped her sweater tightly around her body as Jon struggled to finally come up with an answer for Ben.

"You do special things that most people don't get to do," Ben pressed, eying his mother in the doorway. "Adalie said so."

"Yes, we do special things," Jon sighed. "We work with a lot of very important people and travel to places that not a lot of other people ever get to see. But we are just like everyone else, Ben."

"Adalie said you live and breathe Starfleet." Jon laughed as Ben wrinkled his nose. "How do you breathe Starfleet?"

"You can't believe everything your sisters tell you," Erika said finally coming into the bedroom and sitting down on the bed. "Starfleet is very important to your father and me. It is where we worked for a long time…"

"Until we moved here," Ben added.

"Well, your mom still works for them," Jon gave Erika a small smile.

"And," Erika continued, "Starfleet is where we met."

"Working on the Enterprise," Ben yawned and Erika felt herself relax. Maybe, just maybe they might get this little munchkin to sleep.

"That's right. Now, why don't you try to close your eyes and Dad and I will come back to check on you in a few minutes?" she offered, giving Jon a look.

Ben nodded sleepily and Erika leaned over to give him a kiss on the cheek. "Good night, little man."

###

"Do you ever forget that there is a world out there that isn't utterly wrapped up in the warp trials?" Jon asked as he looked over at her.

"No," she admitted, pushing the loose strands of hair out of her face, "but by your standards, I'm relatively new to all this." That was an understatement, Erika thought. Jon had grown up in this world, but she hadn't. She looked out at the city below them, full of people who had no idea what had been accomplished today under the roof where they were currently sitting.

That had been Jon's idea. They were both exhausted and exhilarated after Rob's text but neither one of them had wanted to go out. Most of their team had been immediately shipped out to the recovery zone to debrief with the pilot who broke the warp three barrier, leaving Jonathan and Erika to clean up and close down the office. She had just powered down both of the simulators, still on standby in case they needed to try out a procedure before calling it up to Rob in orbit of Jupiter when Jon came in with a bottle of wine and two glasses. It was two in the morning.

"Where did you find those?" she had asked as the dull buzz of the computers slowly faded out.

"In Forrest's office," Jon shrugged.

"You took alcohol from our CO's office? Our CO had alcohol in his office? Why did our CO have alcohol in his office?"

"Rike, relax. Forrest said we should have it."

"He did?"

"He did, right before he made me promise not to call him for three days. Something about a vacation in Tahiti before this job kills him…" Jon said, rolling his eyes.

"He did," Erika repeated, still not fully comprehending what Jon was saying.

"I guess he thinks we did a good job."

"We make a pretty good team, don't we?" She smiled as she leaned against the doorway. "Now are we just going to stand here all night or are we going to drink that stuff?"

"You know, there is nothing worse than sitting in our office drinking on a perfectly fine evening like tonight," his tired eyes sparkled with excitement. "How about we go up on the roof?"

"The roof?"

"You aren't scared of heights, are you, Hernandez?"

"Jon…"

"Come on," he said, taking his hand in hers, "We've got everything shut down for the night. Let's go enjoy our victory over those who doubted us."

She shook her head but followed him up row after row of stairs. They had done good work that night, she mused as they climbed. Jon had been running the control room, sitting at the desk in the back with his headset pressed closely against one ear as he struggled to make out what Rob was calling in through the loops and loops of calls from his ground control crew. She had sat one row forward and off to the left at the CAPCOM station, carefully filtering out all the other noise in the room as she ran down her flight manual with Rob. AG had been hovering over her shoulder like a nervous father-to-be at a hospital and Sam had flowed out early to the recovery zone beyond the Kuiper Belt. Finally, everyone had given Jon a go for the test. He had turned around to see Forrest watching from the observation deck and Erika saw him give the slightest of nods before signaling to Erika to give their pilot the order to go. And then everything had worked.

She remembered being terrified when Jon made his first few tests, how she would hold her breath during the brief blackout period with her hand hovering over the emergency scram switch. That part had worried her. The CAPCOM had a scram switch in case they saw something in the pilot's readouts that wasn't right. Several other controllers had that authority as well but they always deferred to the person on the horn with the guy in the cockpit. Erika had quickly learned that her pilots were much less likely to call an abort that most people with a sane mind and she was terrified of calling for a full shutdown only to have all four of them come storming into her office, furious that she had prevented them from blowing themselves up. But eventually, she learned to read them all and learned when to pull them plug and when to ride things out. When Rob began calling in those same intermix problems that Jon had reported before, Erika had calmly held her hand up, hushing everyone who had begun to clamor that it was time to abort. Within minutes Rob had things back under control and every display in the room was reading what they had all been working so hard to achieve: they had gone past warp three.

They finally reached the top of the staircase and Jon opened the door to the rooftop. "After we messed up that warp field test with the main computer…"

"After _you_ messed up that test."

"… and I had to scram the reactor, I came up here to collect my thoughts." He pointed to two chairs set over by the edge of the building, looking out on the lights below. "Now this is one of my favorite places."

"And yet you are sharing it with me?" she quipped.

"Well, you are one of my favorite people. Here, have a seat," he said offering her a chair. "I hauled these up from the slipstream office when they finally got shut down."

"Comfy," Erika said as she sat down in one of the decommissioned office chairs. The slipstream project had been one of their main competitors over the last few years. The pilots and the engineers assigned to that team were working on an experimental drive system that created FTL in an entirely different way than warp. She didn't fully understand it. Truth be told none of them did. Jon had shrugged when she suggested once that it would be good for him to at least learn a little bit about the technology on the off-chance that the warp drive couldn't actually reach the theoretical speeds they were working so hard to achieve. Jon said that over his dead body would the slipstream drive replace the warp drive. AG had decided to stick his head in at that point and noted that with Jon's record of destroying prototypes it would probably happen sooner or later. Jon had thrown a binder at AG and none of them had really thought about the other project much after that.

"This is nice, Jon, it really is," she sighed.

"I know you don't think anyone out there knows what we did here tonight, but trust me they will," Jon said, reaching out to take her hand in his. "We are the next generation of space pioneers and our lives will never be the same."

"You sound pretty sure of yourself."

"Well, I was right about this engine, wasn't I?" he smiled.

"Yes, I suppose you were." She looked at him in the faint light of the stars. "Good work tonight, Jonathan."

"You too, Rike."

###


	4. Chapter 4 - Jon and the Countdown

Chapter 4 – Jon and the Checklist

"Jon?" Erika prompted, pressing her headset a little closer to her face. Part of her was hoping that no one else was listening in, but she highly doubted it. One of the newest additions to the entire program was an intercom system that allowed the higher ups to hear the communications loops between the control room and the simulators, all from the comfort of their own offices. The brass thought it was great. Erika thought it was a recipe for disaster, especially on days like today when the two pilots in the sim appeared to have forgotten that everyone's eyes were on them.

"Hmm?" Jon muttered distractedly.

"STM check?" Erika asked, repeating the request and glancing down at the next item in her checklist.

"Confirmed."

"STM beta?"

"Wait a minute…" Jon said and she could hear him flipping one of the toggle switches back and forth a couple of times. From what she could see on the master display, something wasn't working.

"Call a hold," she ordered, signaling the countdown officer to stop the clock.

"Damn it." Jon swore and tried to restrain himself from kicking something in their billion-dollar machine. He had already broken one of the earlier sim models and if he broke another one, Erika was sure he'd finally get kicked out of the fleet.

"Hang tight boys," Erika sighed. "We're going to try a remote restart of the beta." Jon could hear the exhaustion in her voice as the large countdown clock over his head came to a halt. It was hard to believe they were only fourteen minutes into the three-hour countdown and launch procedure.

"Roger that," AG confirmed, giving Jon an annoyed look. They had been sitting on their backs for hours in the simulator, running through the countdown over and over. Obviously, they didn't have the sequence right. Each time they resumed, one system or another began to falter and they had been forced to start over at least six times already. At first, Jon didn't see what the big idea was. It didn't matter which light switch he turned on first in the apartment so long as they all turned on eventually, he thought. Apparently, the NX prototype simulator thought otherwise.

He wasn't even sure why they were still having these problems. They had already broken the barrier, hell, six months earlier Rob had broken Warp 3. Obviously, the engine worked. Now the issue was transferring everything they had learned and developed for the engine into a practical working starship that would prove once and for all that their years of work on this project would actually have a tangible, meaningful impact on the world of space travel. But as he was just now beginning to understand, if you were going to sit more than two people in the ship, things got a lot more complicated.

"What?" Jon asked as AG continued to stare at him.

"What's up with you today? You aren't focused or anything."

"Erika's sister-in-law is due today," he said quietly.

"So?" his copilot grumbled, reaching to check a readout and mark it in their flight manual.

"So, I'm going to be an uncle," Jon said and he couldn't keep the smile off his face. Well, technically, he wasn't really going to be an uncle. He and Erika weren't even engaged yet, but they would be soon, he knew. But Simon and Maria's baby would be part of his family and from the moment he understood that, he had been a nervous wreck. They had gone down to visit the expectant parents the previous weekend and Maria had laughed outright at some of the things Jon had decided to worry about. She had reassured him over and over that everything was going to be fine, but it didn't stop Erika and her brother from teasing him mercilessly. It wasn't his fault that his experience around pregnant women was slim to none.

"Has she had the baby yet?" AG asked.

"No," Jon admitted.

"Is she even in labor?"

"No… but…"

"Then focus, Archer. We've got a job to do." AG gave him a slap on the back of the head, imitating the way Erika most commonly expressed her disapproval of whatever he was doing.

"Man if you are this bad when it is your girlfriend's sister-in-law, you are going to be terrible when Erika's pregnant."

"Are you two idiots done talking on the live channel or do you have any more words of parenting wisdom you'd like to share with the class?" Jon winced as he heard Erika's voice over the comm.

"Sorry, Rike," he said, reaching over to flip off the live mic.

"I swear to god, Jonathan…" she whispered before clicking her mic off.

"You don't have anything to worry about, you know," AG said, resting his hands behind his head and closing his eyes. Jon shook his head in disbelief. AG Robinson was the only person he knew who could relax in any situation. He had even fallen asleep in the launch chute before making his first historic flight. Jon had asked him about it once and AG had just shrugged and said he had been bored. When it was Jon's turn in the pilot's chair, he felt awake enough to power an entire city. Even after his flight, he was too excited to sleep, despite the fact that when he finally made it back to the test center, it was three in the morning. Even now when they had been sitting in the same dimly lit box for what seemed like an eternity, Jon wasn't even the slightest bit tired.

"I know," Jon sighed. "I can't really help it."

"Well, try to shut up for a little while so that one of us can get a nap in, okay?" AG said, draping his flight manual over his eyes. Jon couldn't help but laugh.

###

"He gets his impatience from you," Erika whispered as they sat down on the couch, glancing back at their son's room.

"At least he doesn't have your temper to go with it." Erika gave him a slap on the head. "Ow! You know its true…"

She laughed softly and he wrapped his arm around her shoulder. "The girls both asleep?"

Erika nodded. "They are pretty excited about all of this too."

"It's the first time they've been home in quite a while," Jon admitted. "They probably aren't going to want to come back here when it is time to leave."

"I've been thinking about that," she sighed. "I'm not quite sure how to deal with that."

Jon thought for a moment. "We can be honest with them. This is a part of their lives that will be over before they know it. It is an incredible adventure but one that takes them away from their family and friends. But we'll be back. The President can't make me stay out here forever…"

"What comes next for us, after this?" Erika asked.

"What do you want to come next?"

"A regular desk job," she smirked and Jon caught the playful look in her eye. "I'd like to work up to one of the deputy chief positions in San Francisco," she admitted in all seriousness. "I liked the work I got to do when I was back there. None of it ever seems boring. One day you are working on deployment schedules and helping captains with their crew manifests and the next day you are overseeing warship development and the latest technological advancements."

"And you are putting out fires when two design bureaus get into a pissing match," Jon groaned, remembering his own tenure in position.

"I liked that kind of work," she admitted. "That is what I want to do next."

"Well, okay then."

"What do you want next?" Erika asked as she ran her hand through his hair.

"There's a council seat that will be open by the time my assignment here ends," he said quietly, not wanting to admit it. His wife caught on immediately.

"You want to run for the Federation Council?"

"I know, I know…"

"I think that is a wonderful idea."

"Really?" he asked, somewhat sheepishly.

"Really. I think you'll be perfect."

"Thanks, Rike," he sighed. "It's just an idea for now."

"I think it is a good idea," she said, leaning over to give him a kiss. "But you know… politicians have to deal with an awful lot of waiting around…"

Jon laughed. "Don't remind me."

###

"Hold," one of the control techs called and Erika signaled again to the countdown officer.

"Hold confirmed. Jon, could I speak to you for a moment?" AG gave Jon a look as he climbed out of the simulator, feeling his muscles sore from the lack of activity. He opened the hatch and hopped down the ladder to the sim control floor. Erika was waiting there, her arms cross and her face clearly displaying that he was in trouble. She grabbed his arm and pulled him into one of the empty computer rooms before closing the door.

"Are you a moron?" she asked.

"What?"

"Are you capable of doing your job? We just called a hold because you couldn't keep your eyes on the intermix chamber." Jon winced. Ever since they had broken warp two, keeping the intermix chamber in the green had been considered one of the easiest jobs on the prototype. And he had just messed it up.

"Do you think she's okay?" he asked.

"She's fine," Erika huffed. "Simon said he would call as soon as things start happening. First babies are always late. And no one is ever born on their due date."

"But it should happen today, right?"

"No one really knows, Jon," Erika said exasperatedly. "That is part of the whole process."

"Oh…"

"Don't make me ground you until she has the baby."

"You have that authority?"

"When it comes to you, yes," she folded her arms across her chest again. "Look, I know this is exciting. But we have a job to do. Focus on that, and I promise I will let you know as soon as I hear anything."

"And then we'll fly down to see them?" Jon asked.

"As soon as the baby is born," she assured him. "Now get your butt back in that simulator so we can finish this mess and go home."

###


	5. Chapter 5 - Frankie and Engine Names

Chapter 5 – Frankie and Engine Names

A/N: This one is a little more melancholy than I normally write, but I hope you enjoy. Also, I'm probably taking a lot of liberties with this one canonically so apologies to Bones – AE

###

Jon walked down the steps into his home office and stopped. His middle child was curled up on his couch reading one of the numerous commemorative plaques that he had been given as part of the NX program. At the time, he had thought that they were ridiculous. In fact, he was pretty sure that he and AG had been drunk during at least one of the ceremonies in their honor. The one held in Montana had been so freezing cold that they both drank liberally as they waited for the cameras to finish setting up. The two pilots were so smashed afterwards that Erika had had to practically carry them back to the hotel. He hoped Frankie wasn't looking at that particular memory.

Now though he had a different view of all the publicity that they had endured as the project achieved one milestone after another. It had been important as their world and society took such major steps towards advanced space exploration. The four pilots were the face of that great experiment. They symbolized the hope and the spirit of exploration. Not very many people outside the program could full understand the warp 2 barrier. If Jon was honest, only Sam and Rob could adequately explain the phenomenon; he and AG just knew they had to go really fast and hope not to die. But people understood heroes.

Jon smiled as he watched Frankie yawn but continue studying the citation. He remembered the endless interviews and media events, how the four pilots and Erika had been prepped on what to say and how to say it, and how they always managed to screw it up. He remembered the dinners with dignitaries and the reporters who used to follow him home at night, or rather who used to follow him to Erika's apartment. The five of them could do no wrong in the public eye. They all tried to brush it off and say that none of the attention really mattered but they all knew they were lying. For once, the public was excited about the greatest scientific and technological development of the century and the entire program was devoted to ensuring that the enthusiasm continued. Even if it meant sending a bunch of glorified test pilots to a ceremony in Montana in the middle of winter.

There was another side to the fame and the attention that Jon didn't like to linger on but one that he ultimately could not escape. There was something about being planet-wide heroes that had changed all of them. Nothing in their lives was private anymore, nothing they did could ever make people forget what they had done so early on in their careers. It had driven Jon to want to throw it all away, to run away and never come back. He had thought he had dealt with his demons before he took command of Enterprise but it all came rushing back to him after the Expanse. There was a tremendous sense of responsibility that they had all assumed back in the NX program, a sense that the hopes and dreams of billions were resting on their shoulders and they could not afford to screw it up. There was a pressure that drove all of them to keep pushing in their careers, even after the mission of the program had been achieved. It drove him to work harder and harder as a captain until he could barely stand under the strain. It drove him to want to climb a mountain alone, something he was eternally grateful Erika stopped him from doing. But neither of them had been able to stop AG.

On some level, Jon wondered if he shouldn't be surprised that one of their team had died so young. They had been willing to risk it all in the pursuit of their mission. For Jon, it was because he felt it was his life's work. For Erika, it was because she approached everything with the same sense of determination no matter the task. For AG, it was because he wanted to fly the newest and most advanced ships anyone had ever seen and he felt he had nothing to lose. All of them had been nearly killed at one time or another during their years with the program, but by some miracle they all survived. Sam had joked that it was because they were all stronger together, but it was true. Without the support of the others in the program, the only other people who understood exactly what their lives were like, they all came dangerously close to spinning out of control. In the end, they were lucky that only one of them had been lost.

Jon looked up at his daughter, still too engrossed in what she was holding to notice her father waiting in the doorway. In so many ways, Frankie was like AG. She was rash and impulsive, running into situations and acting before she thought things through. She was funny and creative, but lately had been using her talents for getting her brother into trouble rather than good. But she also had that same sense of spirit and determination that had made her father's friend the best pilot in the fleet. Whenever one of their children did something absurd or ridiculous, he and Erika would joke that the kid "had a little AG" in them. But there was more to the man than just the stories of getting drunk during awards ceremonies or crashing banquets thrown in their honor.

For Frankie, it didn't seem to faze her that her world was full of references to her father, icon of the United Earth. She wasn't impressed in the medals engraved with his face or the certificates of commendation. She wanted to know the stories of the people involved in the legendary project. Particularly AG. She loved AG.

Of all of his kids, he was most certain that Frankie would follow her father's footsteps as a pilot. She spent hours studying his old flight manuals and engine bibles, the old fashioned notebooks printed with everything they learned about the procedures and processes for operating the now famous engines. His books were filled with notes scribbled in the margins, his own messy scrawl outlining a new shortcut he had thought up, followed by Erika's precise strokes scratching it out for some reason or another. For Frankie, every moment that they diverted from the printed word was a story that she was eager to hear. She often kept her father up late at night with her persistent questions. Like tonight.

"Hey," Jon said softly as he finally made his way into the office and sat down on the couch. "What are you doing still up? Mom said you went to bed hours ago."

"I couldn't sleep," Frankie shrugged, stretching her legs out so that her feet rested on her father's shoulder.

"Thought you'd like to share that with me?" he smiled as he began to tickle her feet. Frankie squealed and sat up, tucking her legs underneath her. Jon wrapped his arm around her shoulder and looked over at the plaque she was holding. "Which one do you have tonight?"

" 'To the pilots, technicians, engineers, and operations teams of the NX Program, in recognition of your outstanding work and dedication in pursuit of breaking the warp 2 barrier,' " Frankie read aloud in mock seriousness. " 'From the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce.' " She frowned and looked up at him questioningly. "Were you drunk at this one too?"

Jon couldn't help but laugh. "Did your mother tell you about that?" he asked.

"Right ship, wrong officer," Frankie said, shaking her head.

"Ah," Jon nodded knowingly. Veronica Fletcher could be traced back as the root of so many of his children's best habits.

"Why'd they call it 'NX' anyway?" Frankie asked.

"It was a code name."

"Code for what?"

"Well," Jon said, "when we first started thinking about further developing warp travel, many different engine designs were proposed. The one your grandfather built was code named the 'N' engine. There were almost a dozen other designs and they all had a different letter of the alphabet. Good so far?"

"Was there an 'F' engine?"

"I think there might have been, but when it came to testing, it ran so hot and so fast that it blew out minutes before breaking warp 2."

"Did they call it the 'Failure Engine'?"

"Very funny," Jon smiled, again thinking how much his daughter would have enjoyed getting to know his late friend. "Anyway, we've got the N engine. And at the same time, the different projects we wanted to use the engines for were give code letters. T was for transports, C was for cargo, D was for low-speed planetary defense ships, E was for long-range explorers and X was for breaking the warp barrier. When they chose engine N for project X, it became the NX program."

"Usually they name ship classes after someone or something," Frankie pointed out.

"That's right, but with the NX, we'd been referring to it as such for so long that it only made sense to keep the name."

"It doesn't go well with the other class names," Frankie said, frowning in a way that instantly reminded him of her mother. "Intrepids, Daedaluses, Agronas…"

"It was a very different type of ship form anything that came before it," he offered. "It didn't really have to match the naming conventions of the ships before it, nor the ships after it."

"Then why does Veronica call her ship the NZ project?"

Jon laughed and Frankie looked at him with a puzzled expression on her face. "That, my darling, is a joke," he leaned over to kiss her on the top of the head. "Your godmother is from New Zealand, something she likes to remind me of on a regular basis."

"Oh…," Frankie smiled. "Are we going to see her when we are back home?"

"I think so. I think the Agrona is in the sector."

"Good," she nodded. "Are we going to see AG?"

Jon paused and looked at his young daughter. They had taken the children to see the memorial to Captain Robinson a few times before. At first Jon had worried that it would be rather morbid for young children, but Erika had thought it was a good idea. He had been an important part of their father's life, Erika had said, and this was a way to share that with his three children. The three of them understood death and they seemed to intuit just how much loss their father had had to deal with in his life.

"Maybe," he sighed. "Is that something you would like to do?"

Frankie nodded. "And Grandpa."

"Of course," Jon said with a tired smile. "We're leaving early tomorrow, Franks. Don't you think you should go back to bed soon?"

"Maybe," she yawned. "But why did you keep working on the NX program after you broke the barrier? Weren't you done with your mission?"

Jon sighed. It was going to be a long night.

###


	6. Chapter 6 - Frankie and the Next Phase

Chapter 6 – Frankie and the Next Phase

###

"You're leaving?"

"Its just a temporary reassignment."

"YOU'RE LEAVING?"

"Jon, saying it louder won't change the answer," Erika said giving him a sad smile.

"But you're leaving the project," he persisted. He wasn't going to be able to get past that point. She was leaving. She was going to work on another project in another part of the complex with other people. She wasn't going to be working with him anymore.

"Yes, I am," she sighed.

"Why?" he asked. Erika reached up to try to grab some of the books on her highest shelf but she couldn't reach. Jon stood up, easily reaching the books, and handed them to Erika, their hands touching for just a moment. Then she turned away and carefully placed the books in a box.

"Why are you leaving?" he repeated, his voice soft as he looked into her eyes.

"They need my help," she turned away from his gaze.

"Who needs your help?"

"One of the communications projects," she said, still not looking back at him. "Don't you want your new ship to be able to talk to other ships when it gets out there?"

"But does it have to be you?"

"No one knows more about what the eventual NX ship will be like and has a communications background," she folded her arms across her chest. "This was my choice, Jonathan."

"Why?"

"Because I can do good work over there, research that will help you in the future. Right now, while you guys are struggling to figure out what comes next, there isn't much for me to do here."

"But you'll be back?" he asked, resting his hands on her shoulders.

"Of course I will," she gave him a reassuring smile.

"Good."

###

"So Mom left the project?" Frankie asked, her eyes widening.

"For a little while, yes," Jon said, trying not to remember how devastated he felt at the time. He had understood her reasoning; with the warp barrier broken, the project had to turn its focus to an infinite number of technical details and decisions. In essence, the majority of the workload shifted from the pilots and operations staff to the engineers. He shouldn't have been surprised when Erika decided to transfer, but it bothered him all the same. He was glad when she came back six months later.

He had teased her about that too. When she came back, virtually none of the theoretical questions that needed to be answered before a ship could be built had even been considered. The pilots spent most of their days in their ready room with a computer and an old style chalkboard brainstorming. The engineers had told them that having the pilots' viewpoints helped, but Jon wondered if they weren't making even more work for themselves by coming up with even more problems to solve.

"When your mother came back to the project, it was as if nothing changed," he said. "We slipped into our old work habits, which meant I was getting into trouble and she was always rescuing me."

"Really?" his daughter asked, with a mischievous smile on her face. Maybe she could relate to needing someone, namely Adalie, to help get her out of trouble, Jon thought to himself.

"Really," he nodded. "I had to sit in on the weekly all-staff meetings and Mom came too. It was her job to translate everything that they said so I could understand what on earth they were talking about."

###

Jon walked into the pilots' lounge and stopped. Three pairs of eyes were looking back at him expectantly, waiting to be briefed on the all-staff. He had a feeling they weren't going to like what he said. In fact, he wasn't sure how he was even going to tell them. He felt someone poking him in the back and turned to see Erika giving him a glare. He sighed and stepped inside.

"So how'd it go?" Sam asked, catching sight of Erika's glare. "Did they tell you how soon it will be til we can start flying again?"

Jon shook his head.

"Then what?" he prompted.

He took a deep breath. "Okay, so you know how we built this ship to be independent and self-sufficient?" he said, sitting on one of the tables and resting his legs on a nearby chair.

"To go out and explore in a way that our current fleet simply could not do?" Sam looked up at Jon.

"Yeah…"

"What?" Sam frowned.

"Command says they want us to make sure it can work well as an integrated component in the fleet."

"You mean play well with others."

"In the most literal sense, yes."

"What exactly makes them think the NX class won't do that already?"

"Maybe the fact that it operates in a totally different language from every other ship?" Erika said leaning against the door.

"It doesn't speak English?" AG asked from his position faced down on the couch.

"No, and neither do you. Move," Erika ordered.

"Erika…" Jon protested.

"Every single system in this ship is going to be brand new. We've never had technology anything like this before. Very few systems are going to be compatible with older systems in the fleet."

"Why are you just telling us now?" AG groaned as Erika shoved his legs off the couch to make room for her to sit down.

"Because you didn't need to know about it before. Now you do," she said simply.

"We do?" Jon asked.

"Jon, have you ever wondered why I work late every single night?"

"Dedication and or a lack of a social life?"

"AG, I swear to god…" Erika muttered, glancing over at him.

"No, I just assumed you were the only one with a key." Or that she was making up for the time she lost when she left the project, he thought to himself. Ever since she had come back, Erika had been working longer hours, putting in more effort than all four of them combined. When he asked, she had told him that she was trying to get back up to speed. Jon doubted that; in the time she had been gone they had barely moved an inch on their timeline towards ship trials. He thought it was something deeper, that she was trying to prove to all of them that she wasn't a quitter. None of them thought she was. In fact, he was the only one who had been mad at her for leaving. Sam had thought it was probably a wise career move and when Erika came back, he listened eagerly to the new advances her team had made in the field of long-range communications. AG had joked that Erika had accomplished more over there in six months than the entire NX program had in the last year, and honestly, Jon wasn't sure if Rob had even noticed Erika had left. It was only Jon that had been deeply affected by her absence.

She had still been in the same city and the same complex, but it wasn't the same. For the first time in their friendship, in their relationship, they had different assignments. He had gotten used to her presence at work, the way she would stand by his side to look over his notes on a new power coupling, the way she would lean her head against his shoulder when she was tired, the way she could read his mind. He loved her, and it only took her transferring away for him to realize that.

"Jon!" He ducked as Erika threw a pillow at him.

"Sorry. What?"

"While you idiots and Sam are getting drunk every night, there's been another team working to develop a set of translation protocols to allow for easy telemetry exchange with the rest of the fleet via subspace," she explained, her eyes lingering on his.

"Oh."

"You know why you should care?"

"Why?" AG asked, his voice muffled by the couch.

"Because if any of you ever have the good fortune to command this ship and by the same dumb luck run into an alien race nice enough to want to exchange technology, you're going to need to be able to talk to them about your systems."

"Oh."

"Not every culture measures things in Cochranes."

"She's got a point, Jon," Sam said with a shrug.

"Don't you start…" Jon gave him a look of mock betrayal.

"We can't design this ship in a vacuum. Like it or not, the NX is part of a fleet and even if she's faster than all of the other ships combined. And god forbid if we ever get into a war, we're going to need a ship that doesn't need months of retrofitting to be an integrated part of our defense plans."

"So what does this mean?" Sam asked, ever practical.

"It means it's going to be even longer before you four are back in the pilot's chair again," Erika sighed. "We've got a lot more work ahead of us."

###

"You missed her when she was gone, didn't you?" Frankie asked but she already knew the answer.

"Yes, I did," he sighed.

"You loved her back then." This time it wasn't even a question.

Jon smiled, "very much so."

"Then why did it take so long for you to get married?"

He could have laughed at his daughter's bluntness. He had heard the same question over and over from all their friends and family.

###

Jon winced as Sam nudged him in the shoulder. "Go. Tell her how you feel."

"I'm going," he sighed, making a show of rubbing his shoulder.

"You've waited long enough," Sam laughed and folded his arms across his chest.

Jon shook his head and walked over to the console where Erika was working. She had a stack of padds on either side and her multiple monitors displayed schematics he could barely understand. She looked like she was swamped with work. Maybe he would come back later, he thought as he tried to turn back. Sam shook his head and pointed back to Erika.

"Hey Rike?"

She looked up at him, giving him a warm smile. "Hi Jon."

Before either of them knew it, they were in each other's arms and his lips were firmly pressed to hers. She ran her hands through his hair as he kissed her cheek, her chin, her forehead. He wrapped his arms tightly around her, almost lifting her up in the air.

"I'm glad you are back," he whispered in her ear.

"Me too."

"I love you."

She leaned in to kiss him again then whispered, "I love you too."

"Well okay then," he smiled as he pulled her close once more.

Neither of them heard the cheers.

###


	7. Chapter 7 - Frankie and the Old Hangar

Chapter 7 – Frankie and the Old Hangar

A/N: So sorry for the terrible delay in this chapter! If you haven't noticed already, there is a pattern with the chapters; three for a child, one just of Jon and Erika, and then three about one of the kids. By that logic, we are over halfway done. Thank you for sticking with me on this one!

###

"Do you ever miss it?" Frankie asked, picking up an old model of the NX Alpha and holding it gently in her hands. Jon had been surprised by how carefully all three of his children regarded the model ship. There seemed to be a deep sense of reverence for the ship and what it represented to their father. On some level they understood what it meant, the beginning of a new era not just for space travel and exploration but for their father as well. They knew it was special and not just because he and Erika had told them so many stories about it. They treated the small ship with care and Jon was still amazed it had lasted longer than the real version.

Frankie poked him in the side and Jon realized he still hadn't answered her question. "Miss what?" Jon asked.

"Working with Mom."

"Every day," he sighed. "Frankie, I just went through this all with your brother. Is there anything I can do to make you actually go to bed?

"Do you miss working in San Francisco?"

"Not at all what I asked but okay…" Jon muttered to himself. "I used to, especially when your mom worked there and I didn't."

"Right before Adalie was born?"

"That's right. One time I even took her to the old NX building when I was home on leave. Mom thought I had lost my mind."

###

"We aren't supposed to be in here, you know."

"The locked doors and dark lights gave me that indication."

"I'm serious, Jon. I'm surprised my code even worked to get in."

"Relax, Erika. I just wanted to see the old place again." He walked over to one of the panels on the wall and flipped three large switches. Lights flickered on across the hangar, first closest to them and then further and further away like signals on a runway guiding a craft in. Jon smiled as he looked around.

"It looks the same in here, doesn't it?" he said as his voice echoed in the cavernous space.

"I was just thinking it looked completely different," Erika sighed, shaking her head. She supposed they were both right. During their time with the NX Program, this hangar had been the center of activity for the entire project. On any given day, all of the senior pilots, the support staff and the engineering teams would be filling the building as they worked. The large prototypes and simulators had taken up the majority of the floor space, with massive computer banks surrounding them. The offices of the senior staff were up on the second floor so that they could look down from the balcony to see what was going on, but in reality, the balcony just got them all into trouble. AG had attached a rope to it so he could just swing down to the ground, Erika had purposefully dropped things from up there onto Jon's head when he wasn't paying attention, and Forrest always seemed to be pounding his fists against the railing when things weren't going as planned.

Of course, the balcony did have its good moments. She remembered standing up there and looking down at the first prototype right after it had been delivered from the production field. It had been an odd looking ship, not at all what their end goal would look like but it would get the job done. Until AG blew it up. But at the time, the ship was strange and beautiful and she had been mesmerized as she watched one of the routing electrical tests one afternoon. Each tracking light winked on and then off as the engineers switched the ship over to internal power for the first time. Suddenly, it all had seemed so real. It wasn't an academic project anymore. They had built a ship and it was right in front of her. She had gotten chills and had jumped a foot when Jon had snuck up behind her.

The balcony was still up there but now the prototypes were gone, leaving the hangar feeling empty and hollow. New and improved simulators had replaced the older ones and a small bank of consoles was all that remained of the giant super computers that they had all relied on. Erika wasn't sure exactly what project was even using the hangar anymore. To her, the place seemed that something out of a half-forgotten dream, something she recognized but only just.

She had a feeling Jon didn't see it that way.

"You used to stand up there all the time and watch what we were doing on the floor," he said looking up at the balcony. She nodded. "I feel like a kid going back to high school after their graduation," he said softly.

"Or a kid who graduated and then comes back to school on their vacation…" He laughed but she couldn't help but see how happy he was to be back here. He didn't get to be near this place almost every day like she did. "You've got a limited amount of leave to spend time with your pregnant wife and you chose to come back here. Why?"

"Because I miss this place."

"You miss the work you did here?" she asked.

"More than that. I miss the person I was here."

"You miss being naïve."

"I suppose that is a part of it," he admitted. "I miss the excitement that we all felt about what we are doing, the fear of the unknown that was tempered by our belief that we could do anything. The world wasn't as complex as it is now."

"And if you think the world is complex, wait til you see the rest of the quadrant."

"You know what I mean, Rike."

"You are still that person. That youthful optimism hasn't been beaten out of you just yet, no matter how hard your missions seem to try."

"They seem to be trying pretty hard lately," Jon sighed running his hand through his hair. That was an understatement to be sure. But he didn't want to think about that, not now anyways. He didn't want to think about being away from this place or from Erika if he didn't have to. Already he was dreading the day when he would have to say goodbye and head back to Enterprise. He loved his ship, he really did, but Erika… she was bigger than she looked in their regular calls. He had finally felt the baby kick, something that had brought a smile to his face that nothing could wash away. He loved Erika and he missed her. And it was hard not to think about what their lives would be like if he wasn't captain of Enterprise.

"So they train the new pilots out here?" Jon asked.

"I don't even know," she admitted.

"I saw a report that in the new training course the pilots aren't going to set foot in a simulator for the first three weeks," he said, looking over at her to see if she had seen the same thing. She had and she had known Jon wasn't going to like it.

"The instructors want to make sure the students have a solid academic understanding of the concepts that power their ships before they let them loose at the controls."

"That is a load of crap."

"Not that I agree with them," she muttered.

"Those kids need to get in the sims as soon as they can. That is the only way they are going to learn."

"There are different ways to teach someone."

"You can't develop the instincts unless you spend every waking hour at the helm."

"Jon, we can't lock them in flight simulators until they learn how to fly these ships…."

"Why not?"

"Aside from the legality?" Erika laughed.

"Aside from that yes," he huffed.

Erika shook her head and gave him a funny look. "You know that isn't how we were trained." She folded her arms across her chest, an act that was becoming more and more difficult as her belly grew. "That is not how we want the next generation to be trained."

"They aren't going to be learning fast enough."

"They have more to learn that we ever did. The world these ships will fly in is changing faster than we can keep up. I think they are doing just fine."

Jon sighed. "They don't know what they're doing."

"No," she admitted. "Not yet."

"Will they ever?"

"Of course they will. Things are different now. We aren't in such a huge rush to get capable officers out in space that we have to train them on the job. We have an opportunity now not to hope that our officers will learn from others during a crisis but to teach them in a dedicated educational environment." She studied his face as he looked over at the simulators. "I thought you were excited about the idea of extended training before commissioning."

"I am," he said, turning and putting his arm around her shoulder. "I just…"

"Then what, Jon?" she sighed.

"We're part of a different generation from them, aren't we?" he said sadly.

"Yes, we are."

"The people we worked with, that we trained with, aren't the ones out there on the frontlines anymore."

"There are some still out there, like you," she said, nudging him in the shoulder but he scoffed. "But most of the officers from our era have gone on to other things, whether it is shore assignments, the admiralty or leaving the fleet all together."

"How can we be sure that the fleet won't change because of that?"

"Is change so bad?"

"We have something that is good with Starfleet. I want to make sure that we can preserve it."

"We will," she assured him. "Sam Gardner will drop dead before he lets anything happen to Starfleet."

Jon put his hand gently on her belly. "He's not working you too hard, is he?"

"No, then he really would drop dead."

"Very funny. I wish I could stay longer."

"Me too," she said, resting her head on his shoulder. "Come on, old man…"

"Hey!"

"Let's go get Thai food," she smiled as she felt the baby start kicking. "Someone has been asking for it all day."

###

"Frankie, let your father come to bed please," Erika sighed. "I don't care how late you stay up, just let him go to sleep."

"He does look pretty tired, doesn't he?" Frankie said, looking up at her father.

"And the bed is feeling empty," Erika said softly as Jon chuckled.

"I know your mom just said that you can stay up but…"

"I'll go to bed," Frankie hopped up from the couch.

"Thank god…"

###


	8. Chapter 8 - Jon and the Promotion

Chapter 8 – Jon and the Promotion

"Gods I'm exhausted," he heard his wife say as he finally fell onto their bed.

"Everyone was unusually troublesome tonight," he sighed as wrapped his arm around her.

"At least they got to sleep," Erika said as she reached over to turn out the light. "It should make tomorrow a little easier."

"You know, Rike…" he started but stopped when he saw her expression.

"We are not going to have another one of those baby girl Columbia Archer conversations, Jon."

"One of these days you'll have to tell me that whole story," he said with a smile.

"One of these days," she agreed.

###

"Tell me again why I have to go to this meeting."

"Jon…"

"I'm serious. Why do I need to be there?"

"Because you were just named the captain of the newest and most advanced ship in the fleet," Erika said handing him yet another briefing binder and motioning for him to follow her.

"I somehow forgot that with all the speeches and press conferences."

"You really don't want to be reminding anyone about those speeches right now, Captain."

Jon stopped and watched Erika as she collected more reports off his desk. "You aren't going to start calling me that, are you?" he asked softly.

"It's your new rank, Jon," she said without looking up.

"But when it is just you and me?"

"It's never going to be just you and me any more, don't you see that?" she sighed, brushing a stray lock of hair behind her ear. Jon saw her bite her lip before continuing to dig through the piles of paper that shouldn't have even been necessary with all the computer documents he had been receiving daily. He unceremoniously dumped the binders on the desk and reached over to take Erika's hand in his.

"Why? Nothing is going to change between us," he said, trying to reassure her.

"Everything has changed, Jonathan," she laughed but her tone was sad.

"Yes, I outrank you but it doesn't mean…"

"What doesn't it mean?" she said turning to him, her face cross and her eyes tired.

"I'm not going anywhere, Erika. Not for a long time." Erika just shook her head and went back to her work.

"You are going to need this for the briefing tomorrow," she said, handing him another packet before making her way to the door.

"Erika, wait…" Jon called after her.

"We don't need to do this now."

"Yes we do." He moved to close the door. "Rike, I know what you are thinking and I want you to know that it doesn't change a thing."

"You are technically my superior now. I don't know how we could possibly…"

"Don't say that. Please don't say that."

"Jon, I don't know if you've had time to process this but our worlds have changed. You are going to be a captain of a ship."

"Not for a long time." Jon reached out to put his hands on her shoulders. "Erika, they named me captain because it was finally time to choose one. This ship is nowhere near ready to go. It is going to be quite a while before I'm out on deployment. And who knows, maybe by then you'll have a ship too."

"We can't do this," she shook her head and Jon could hear the emotion in her voice.

"Why not? I love you." He smiled a little as he said it. She had always joked with him that he had always been so ready to say those words, so free with his emotions. By contrast, she was guarded and cautious, almost afraid to admit her feelings for fear that it would lead to her getting hurt. It had taken so much convincing to assure her that he wasn't going anywhere and they really could make things work before she even agreed to go out with him. And they had never looked back, until now. When Jon received his promotion, he hardly had anytime to think about what it really meant for his day-to-day life but he was starting to realize that maybe Erika had.

"But you are a captain and I'm…"

"And you are the woman I love," Jon nodded and cut her off.

Erika laughed in spite of herself. "It doesn't work like that."

"I think it does."

"What will people say?"

"That I shouldn't reference wild animals during speeches?" Erika laughed again and he pulled her tightly into his arms. "Nothing is going to change. No one, not anyone on this planet or another one is going to change the fact that I love you and that you love me. Or have your thoughts on that matter changed?"

"No, they haven't," she said with a smile, the first real smile of the entire conversation.

"So…" he prodded and Erika rolled her eyes.

"I love you too."

"Well that's good," Jon said as he leaned over to kiss her on the forehead.

###

"You were scared then, weren't you?" he asked, his voice soft as he looked over at her.

"When was this?" she asked as she leaned back against her pillow.

"When I was promoted. You were scared that we would have to break up."

"Yes, I was," she admitted. "And I'm still not entirely certain why you weren't."

"Because I was a self-absorbed, newly-minted captain who thought he could get away with anything. And I did, by the way," he added with a smirk.

"I'm still not sure how you managed to pull that off either."

"I have my ways," he said as he kissed her on the cheek.

###

"We can't spend all day standing here like this…" she said finally. Jon only pulled her even closer to his chest. "I'm serious. At least one of us has to get back to work."

"I just want to make sure you are okay," he sighed as he let her go.

"I am now," she smiled up at him. She brushed his hair back from his forehead, twirling it around in her fingers. She sighed and leaned her head against his chest. "I know that this is what we've been working for, what you've been hoping for your entire life, but now that its happened… I don't know. Is it strange to want things to go back to the way they were just a few weeks ago?"

"No, I've been thinking about that a lot lately too," he admitted as he stroked her hair. "This is big, Rike. Bigger than I'm even ready to admit. And it is terrifying. Sometimes I want to go back to being one of four test pilots instead of the one and only NX captain."

"I'd never let you do that, you know," she said, her voice muffled against his chest.

"I know. This will be good, Rike. This will be different, but it will be good."

"I don't want what we have to change."

"It won't. I promise." He kissed the top of her head, then stopped, realizing something. "There is one thing I'd like to change."

"And what is that?"

"Well," he said, pulling away from her for a moment before reaching out to take both of her hands in his. "Erika Hernandez, will you marry me?"

Instantly her face broke into a smile and her eyes shown as she looked back at him with disbelief. He held his breath as he watched her, trying to read her expression but he had a feeling he knew what she was thinking.

"Yes," she whispered.

"I don't ever want to lose you. I don't want anything to ever come between us or take me away from you. I want to spend my life with you, I…" he stopped as he felt her mouth meet his.

"Shut up, Jon. I said yes," she laughed as she kissed him again.

###

"You didn't have to tell me to shut up, by the way."

"You were rambling. I was worried you were going to bring up the gazelles," Erika deadpanned. "That, and I just really wanted to kiss you."

"I'm glad you did."

"Me too," she smiled. "Goodnight, Jonathan."

"Sleep well, Rike."

###


	9. Chapter 9 - Adalie and the New Plans

Chapter 9 - Adalie and the new plans

Jon knew he should be packing. But Starfleet had sent him a new set of design plans that he technically needed to be ready to discuss when they arrived home. Something about a new ship for the Joint Andorian Federation Task Force, much more Erika's purview than his. And he couldn't take his eyes off the blueprints.

"It doesn't look like your ship," Adalie observed from her seat across the table.

"No, I suppose it doesn't," Jon admitted. "As new technologies are developed the way our ships look begins to change. A different hull configuration, a different nacelle rigging. The same basic components are there but just a little different. You know," Jon said as he handed Adalie a cup of hot chocolate, "when we first were building my ship she looked nothing like anything we had ever built before."

###

"How did we get on this design track anyways?" Jon asked as he flopped down on the couch in the pilots' room. "It looks nothing like the old UESPA ships at all."

"To be fair," Sam noted, "those were really just giant blimps." Jon watched as the senior pilot lowered himself into one of the straight-backed chairs near the couch. Jon couldn't understand why Sam wasn't exhausted. They had been up all night drafting the procedures for the next test and he could barely keep his eyes open any more. Sam just looked like his world weary self, deep in though as he worked through multiple problems in his head.

The most serious issue they were facing was that in order to come up with the procedures and mission parameters, they had to know what worked and what didn't. That meant that half their team crammed into one of the simulators and the other half stayed in the control room calling out orders. If the sim team was able to execute it without any major problems, then they added it to the list of steps. If the sim crashed and burned, then the control team had to try and figure out what went wrong with the complicated sequence of engine burns, computer shut downs, and comm passes before they tried the sequence all over again.

Jon had been lucky; he had drawn the sim assignment for the day. It hadn't been his responsibility to figure out why one step between the SRV shut down and the SATCOM recycle kept wiping out their navigational computer. That had been Sam's job. All Jon had to do was report in that yes once again something had gone wrong. And while he waited for new instructions on how to proceed, he had a lot of time to think.

He wasn't sure how he got on to the idea of ship design legacy. He probably had been thinking about how cramped it was in the simulator and wished that someone higher up would finally decide to build a ship where a man could stand up comfortably. The pre-warp ships had never had that problem. Maybe people had been shorter then.

"I can't understand how those structures were even able to work with a warp field," Jon said thinking of the UESPA ships again.

"Back then, hull shape didn't even matter," Sam noted. "All they needed was something strong enough to hold up while at warp. It wasn't until we came up against the barrier that someone realized how great a factor hull shape played in the whole equation."

"Still, the ships we build now are so radically different from what we used to have that it is hard to tell they were built by the same civilization."

Sam gave him a funny look. "Is it important that our ships look like they belong to the same family?"

"In the greater scheme of things," Jon sighed, "no."

"But it does bother you, doesn't it?"

Jon gave a half smile. "I want to be able to see our design lineage in any ship I look at. I want to look across the sky and know that ship is one of ours."

"You will," Sam nodded with an encouraging smile. "This ship will fit right in with the last one and the one that comes next."

That was something Jon had to force himself to remember; there would be ships and designs that came after this one. At times it seemed as though the NX was going to be the end-all-be-all of the fleet. It was designed to solve every problem they had currently and took the program to a whole new level of exploration. But for every problem they solved, he knew they were probably creating another one that someone else on some other design team would have to fix. He wondered if it really was worth it to build ships now only to have to retrofit and redesign later. Of course it was, he chided himself. If it wasn't, he'd be out of a job.

"Sam, was it like this on the Neptune and the Nova?"

"Like what?"

"Like we're flying half-blind. Like we're designing a ship in isolation and hoping that it will fit the circumstances we drop it into."

"A little," Sam admitted. "But you've got to remember that both of those projects didn't have the added component of a brand new engine. A lot of the puzzles had already been figured out on those ships or at least it wasn't our job to solve the others. We spent less time on the engine and more on the interface, hull geometry, sensor packages, flight controls, and environmental controls. Our mission was to create patrol ships back then. This," he gestured at the plans covering the coffee table, "is something else entirely."

"With the Neptune project," Sam continued, "we actually thought if we worked hard enough we could find a way to push that ship past warp 2. We wanted to see if they could create the barrier

without using a new engine."

Jon scoffed. "Obviously, it didn't work."

"No kidding," Sam chuckled. "We got a pretty nice ship but it wasn't exactly what they were aiming for. You were still on the engine project during all that, weren't you?" Sam asked.

"Yeah, I had this crazy idea that I would be an engineer."

"Carry on your father's legacy?"

"Something like that," Jon admitted. "But it became clear very quickly that my talents were best applied elsewhere."

"You're a good pilot, Jon."

"Thank you," Jon shrugged, embarrassed at the compliment.

"You'll make a good captain someday," Sam said.

"Not as good as you. You're a big picture person. I tend to get bogged down in the details. Like these damn procedure tests."

"As you should," Sam said, knowingly. "The details are important. That is what will stand between you and death out there. Besides, I'm not going to be putting in for a command when all this is done."

Jon felt his jaw drop. "You're kidding. Sam, you've got the seniority on all of us. The ship could be yours if you wanted her."

"I don't though," the older man sighed. "I've spent my whole career designing ships and building Starfleet. This is what I love, what I want to do. For you, Rob and AG, this is just one step in your journey to the captain's chair. For me, this is my goal."

"I can't say I understand you, but I respect that. Someone's got to stay behind and make sure there's an organization able to take our calls for help when something goes wrong out there."

"Exactly," Sam laughed. "And someone has got to make sure that all our new designs match up to the high expectations of Jonathan Archer."

###

There had to be something special about this new design or else they wouldn't have sent it to him. Of course, Jon was still a respected figure in Starfleet, but he had left the service for the diplomatic corps. Still, every now and then Trip would send him the schematics of the newest design they were working on and ask for his input.

Because of the time difference, the plans had arrived by secure transmission early in the morning. Eager to see them, Jon had gotten up and headed downstairs to the kitchen table he had insisted they bring from their home on Earth and began reading. Before long, he heard soft footsteps on the stairs and looked up to see Adalie, her hair tousled but her eyes bright as she peered into the kitchen.

"Did you get a new set of plans?" she had asked quietly.

Jon grinned. "Come on over and take a look with me."

###


	10. Chapter 10 - Adalie and the Miscarriage

Chapter 10 - Adalie and the miscarriage

A/N: Trigger warning. This chapter discusses a miscarriage in the past. All credit and inspiration for this particular storyline goes to the incredible Bonesbird/Meredith Brody who first wrote about this in her incredible story "The First Missions." If you haven't read it, go read it. It is incredible.

###

Jon watched as Adalie looked over the plans. Years of looking over plans with her father had taught her to recognize the important parts of the ship; the nacelles, the engine, the bridge, the crew quarters. Now she examined the plans closely, reading the drafters notes carefully and slowly as only a nine-year-old could.

Adalie would always be special in her father's eye. It wasn't just because she was the oldest, but that certainly helped. Everything she did was new and exciting to Jon. When she took her first steps, it was the first time he had seen a baby learn to walk. When she had started school, it was his first time being that nervous parent who hoped that their child would make friends. And when she began to read, he eagerly gave her book after book that his mother had gave him when he was her age.

His excitement over each milestone that Adalie hit did nothing to diminish his excitement when Frankie or Ben reached the same point, but there was something special about Addie. She had been conceived while her parents were serving as starship captains, something that was still unheard of all these years later. She was smart, so smart that it was almost frightening, Jon mused, like her mother. She was a natural leader, organizing her sister and brother to play whatever game she had determined that they should play that day. She was compassionate and kind and understood more of what her parents discussed in hushed tones than either of them was ready to admit.

There had been a child before Adalie, one that they lost and one that they hadn't talked about with their other children.

They hadn't been married long when Erika first began to feel sick in the mornings. Even the simplest act of rolling over in bed was enough to make her wince as the nausea swept over her. They both recognized what it was immediately.

They went in for a scan right away, but they already knew what the diagnosis was. She was pregnant, about six weeks along. Jon remembered how he felt his heart swell with emotion as he watched his wife talking with the duty physician about her condition. Erika had looked so beautiful and so calm in that moment, quite the contrast to his own state of mind. He was nervous and terrified. They had talked about this, late at night when they were both half asleep and he had whispered to her that he wanted to start a family. They hadn't even been married then. Erika had nodded and told him to go back to sleep.

They talked about it when they were both awake too. This time Erika had been scared. She wasn't sure how she would be able to balance a baby and her career. At that point, there were very few officers in the fleet who were married, let alone parents and it left them both feeling as though they were venturing into uncharted territory. They both wanted kids, eventually but Jon had wanted them sooner and Erika had wanted them later. After they became engaged and after many late night talks, they had decided that they would try for a baby. Enterprise was a ways away from completion and they were both content with their shore assignments. Neither of them was surprised when Erika got pregnant so quickly.

They had kept it to themselves for the first few weeks and after that only telling their closest friends and family. Erika's morning sickness had been horrendous and she had had to take a few days off from work just to rest. That was when Sam Gardner figured it out. He had covered for her in the control room during a test launch before pulling Jon aside to ask what was going on. Jon had been worried about what their colleagues would think but Sam had been just as excited as they were. It had made it all the more heartbreaking when Erika had had the miscarriage.

It wasn't something they talked about. None of the children knew that there had been a baby before them. Adalie had been born a few years later. Careers and long distance relationships had become their entire lives as they each grieved in their own way. Jon got Enterprise and Erika got Columbia and for a while they stopped talking about starting a family.

Jon had been willing to give it another try. Nothing the doctors said had precluded them from trying again for a healthy pregnancy. But Erika was scared. The loss had hit her tremendously hard and as much as Jon knew the chances of it happening again were slim, Erika was too afraid to take the risk. So he left it in her hands. He knew they would start a family eventually; he just had to give his wife some time. He knew she wanted children. He had seen her with her nieces, two beautiful girls that they both had loved since birth and he knew that she wanted to be a mother. So he sat back and waited until she was ready again.

It came sooner than either of them could have ever anticipated. As Enterprise and Columbia settled into regular patrol patterns, their captains found themselves spending more and more time operating their ships together. Erika stayed on Enterprise more often than not, and late one night she whispered to her half asleep husband that she was ready. It wasn't long before she found herself so dizzy that she could barely stand without leaning heavily against the bulkhead.

That first miscarriage affected them both throughout each of their successive healthy pregnancies. With Adalie, Erika had been terrified to tell her crew because she worried it would happen again. With Frankie, she had held off on telling her boss because Sam had been one of the people who quietly held her hand in support before. And with Ben, she had been too scared to even find out if she was pregnant in the first place. But she had carried all three of her children safely and healthily. They were beautiful in a way that was a perfect combination of their parents. They were each different and unique in a way that made Jon thank the stars every day. They were perfect.

And one day, they would wonder why there was one day a year when their father would find their mother softly crying in the bedroom. Maybe they would wonder like he did how it was possible to feel such joy and completeness in his life, yet still grieve for something they had lost so many years ago. They would ask questions he probably didn't have the answers to, questions he was sure he didn't want to have answers to. He knew his children and he knew that all three of them would ask "will that happen to me?" He hoped not. He hoped that they wouldn't have to go through something like that in their lives, but he prayed that they would have someone like he did, someone to walk through it with them.

It wasn't something they dwelled on, or even something he thought about every day. It was a part of their lives in the past, something to be looked at but not stared at.

He turned back to his eldest daughter as her fingers traced the schematic plans in her hands. He hoped she knew how special she was to him, how she would never have to do anything ever to prove herself to him. She was nine years old and already she could do things neither of her parents thought possible.

He saw her fingers linger on one of the nacelles as if by touching it she could absorb its information. She looked up at him and smiled.

###


	11. Chapter 11 - Adalie and Their History

Chapter 11 - Adalie and their history

A/N: Now back to our regularly scheduled fluff.

###

Adalie listened intently as she sipped her hot chocolate while he explained each and every detail on the plans, discussing their significance and often throwing in a story of how something that he or her mother had done wrong or broken had resulted in this particular change. Even a decade after Enterprise and Columbia's first captains had moved on to bigger and better promotions, the Corps of Engineers was still learning from their missions. As a new era of peace descended on their corner of the galaxy, the lessons learned during the war began to make their way into the technology of the new Federation Starfleet.

"See this right here?" he pointed to a sketch of a small box with all sorts of lines of power tracing in and out of it. "This is going to be a plasma flow regulator emergency cut off switch on a separate power grid from the regular one."

"Why do you need that?" Adalie asked.

"What if you are having engine problems and your main power grid is fluctuating too badly for you to be able to use the shut off switch? You'll have uncontrolled plasma acceleration that could shoot your ship past its highest warp factor rating and tear it apart."

"Sounds bad."

"It can be very bad. Just ask your mother," Jon said with a smile as he looked up to see Erika standing in the doorway. "She had to come rescue me one time when I couldn't get my engine to shut off." There had been a lot more going on at the time but for the moment he figured Adalie would be able to understand what he meant.

"Your mom had to fly her ship so close to mine that Enterprise was inside Columbia's warp field," he said, holding his hands out flat, one hovering slightly above the other. "We had to shut everything down and reset. And Trip had to climb from one ship to the other at warp in order to save us." Jon could hear Erika laugh at his over simplification of things.

"Your dad broke his ship pretty badly. And Trip and I had to save him," she sad, grabbing a cup of coffee and sitting down at the table. "This shut off is going to save us a lot of trouble in the future. I'm surprised it's taken them this long to build it."

"They put in other safeguards to make sure no other ship would be in the same situation but it took a lot of testing for them to make sure this switch could work, even if everything else on the ship fails."

Adalie was looking over the plans again. "What else did they add to this design?"

"It looks like they built a lot of things," Jon said as he looked closer at the plans. "Each change was designed to help our ships be better able to go out on their own for long periods of time."

###

"Our ships don't travel alone, Jon," Sam sighed. They had been through this line of reasoning before. And yet Jon had never been able to get the other pilots to see things from his perspective. But that didn't stop him from trying again and again.

"This one can," he said confidently.

"Our ships need deuterium tankers, tenders, support ships, communications ships, medical ships. They don't go on solo missions."

"And I'm telling you the NX will be able to. Its got stores for five plus years, a more efficient reactor than anything we've seen before…"

"And one that doesn't work…" muttered AG.

Jon glared but ignored him. "… the smallest, most powerful subspace transmitter and receiver anyone has ever built, a medical bay…"

"And what happens when something breaks on this wonder ship and you are nowhere near a drydock?" AG asked, his annoyance at the whole thing creeping into his tone.

"We've got onboard maintenance personnel and engineering officers, like a boomer."

"Boomers don't have reactors that can go critical and turn a solar system to slag, Jon."

"Then we'll have really, really good engineers on board! We're getting pretty good at training them."

"I'm not convinced yet. This thing is so different from anything else we've ever built…" Sam sighed and shook his head.

"It has to be. Sam, something this powerful and this fast is for exploring, not traveling in a pack. It needs to be on its own out there and we've built it to be able to do that. The NX isn't ready yet, but it will be."

"And when it is, you got a name for it?"

"Enterprise."

"You know this is all theoretical right?" Erika asked as she cautiously ventured into the conversation. Jon frowned at her. He had been hoping that out of the four other people in the room that she would be the one most sympathetic to his cause. No such luck.

"Erika…"

"What? Nothing you do or say will matter until the board approves it. If they want this ship to be an integrated part of the fleet, then this ship is an integrated part of the fleet. If they say you can have your exploratory missions, then you are in business. It doesn't matter what you think."

"Thank you as always for that bright and cheery perspective, Lieutenant Hernandez…" AG muttered under his breath.

"You know I'm right."

"I think some of us would prefer not to dwell on that fact," AG said, nodding towards Jon.

"Think about it this way. If they deny us the green light right now, it just gives us more time to learn from our mistakes and make an even better ship."

"And it means more time before we get out into deep space," Jon said quietly.

"We'll get there," Erika assured him, putting her hand around his shoulder. She gave him a look, just a simple look and suddenly he knew she was right. It was as if everyone else in the room faded away. As he looked into her eyes, he could see their future, a world where deep space travel was a reality, not just a dream of five officers in a cramped pilot's lounge. He could see their ships, advanced beyond anything they could even dream of now. He could see himself in the captain's chair of one of those ships. He smiled and shook his head as he tried to keep from getting carried too far away.

"See?" Erika whispered. "We'll get there. Before you know it, we'll be out there."

###

"Did Trip say if this type has a class name yet?" Erika asked as she leaned over his shoulder.

"They want to call it the "Enterprise class.""

###


	12. Chapter 12 - When We First Met

Chapter 12 – When We First Met

"Adalie? Can you go wake your brother and sister? We've got to leave soon," Erika sighed as she glanced at the clock. Jon couldn't help but smile as he watched his eldest hop eagerly down from her chair. He glanced at Erika, wondering if she was thinking the same thing as he was, namely that Adalie had a funny habit of waking her siblings up in the most annoying or destructive way she could think of. He figured Trip could be blamed for the time Adalie dumped a bucket of water on Ben or the time she blasted Frankie with loud music. Erika shrugged as if to say that she didn't much care about the method so long as everyone got up and at it, the sooner the better.

"Do you ever wonder what would have happened if we had taken a different path in our lives?" he said, glancing at the plans on the table. "If the program had been cancelled…"

"It was," Erika pointed out. "You just didn't listen."

Jon chose to ignore that particular detail. "… if we had taken different assignments or never even joined the program in the first place. There were so many points along the way where we could have split off and never ended up the way we are now. You could have stayed with the linguistics team."

"You could have been fired."

"Rike, I'm serious."

"I know," she gave him a soft smile. "We'd have been alright."

"I'd like to think so."

He couldn't actually imagine a world without her. She had been such a force in his life from the first moment he saw her and over the years he had come to depend on her in a way he never thought he would depend on another person. Without her, he felt incomplete. Whenever she was gone, whether it was for a couple of hours or a couple of weeks, he struggled to get through it. Their children helped. They were so much like their mother, each in their own different ways, that it always brought a smile to his face.

But the reality of their lives and their careers meant that they occasionally had to do things apart. Looking back, Jon wasn't sure how he had even managed during Enterprise's missions. That had been the one part of his life that she really had not been a part of. They had always known it would be that way but it wasn't real until he stood at the podium for his ship's commissioning ceremony without her.

He had imagined what she would have said to him if she had been here, how she would have smiled and placed her hand lightly on his arm. How she would have laughed at how his nerves threatened to control him. How she would assume that everything would have been okay.

But she hadn't been there. She had been off on her own mission, fulfilling her own dreams and goals and working towards her own eventual command. That was the tragic nature of their relationship; they both wanted so much and the only way they could each achieve it was to be apart. His heart broke every time he had had to say goodbye to her and he felt as if he became whole each time he got to see her face again. Neither of them had fully understood what they were in for when they signed up for all this and neither of them had been fully willing to admit just how much of a toll it had taken.

It had been so much easier during the NX Program. She had been right there, every single day, always within his grasp. Every now and then he would wonder how other couples managed it all, separated by deployments, isolated save for the comm links and video chats, and lonely for the other person who made them whole. But each time he worried, he had tried to push that thought out of his mind as fast as he could. Back then, it didn't do any good to dwell on the uncertainly of the future, especially when it came at the expense of the present.

But they both had known it wouldn't last. She had been offered a mission first, just as the NX Program was winding down and its officers were beginning to scatter. And so she had taken it. Within a few weeks, the woman he had loved most in the world was gone and he was left to wait for the NX 01 command assignment. When it finally came out, she had been the first one he called. She'd been exhausted, he remembered, because he had forgotten about the time difference. But in that moment, he didn't care and neither did she. Her face lit up when he told her, her smile contagious across the light-years. More than anyone he would tell after that, she understood exactly what it had meant for him. She had worked along side him for almost a decade at that point, as he poured everything he had into this ship and its design. She had watched him struggle to come out from his father's brilliant shadow, to make a name for himself based solely on his own merits. She had seen him falter when it looked like the program might be scrapped. She had sighed with her ever-patient understanding as he did everything he could to keep the program alive, even at the expense of his own career. She had cried tears of joy with him when everything finally worked and she had held her breath for months waiting for the command announcement.

It had all moved so quickly that in that moment they both knew she would never be able to make it back in time for the launch. She told him years later that she had cried when the call ended and she realized what she would be missing. He hadn't thought of it like that. He had only been thinking of how much he would miss her being at his side during the commissioning and launch. He had kicked himself for not realizing just how badly she wanted to be there too. Not just to see the launch of the ship that they had devoted so much time and energy to but to see the man she loved achieve the thing he wanted most in the world. When he understood that, he finally understood the true symbiotic nature of their relationship.

At the time, they had both joked that had she been there, there would have not been any references to wild animals but the truth was things would probably have ended up exactly the same. As he had approached the dais, he had scanned the crowd, longing to see a glimpse of her ponytail, her eyes, her smile, even though he knew he wouldn't find her. He had wanted to see her, just one more time before it all began and everything changed. He wanted her to tell him not to be afraid and to tell him how wonderful this all was going to be. He wanted her to make him believe those things instead of the doubts swirling in his mind.

He had wanted her to tell him this wouldn't change anything between them, but they both had known it wasn't true. A captaincy was bound to change everything in ways they were not yet able to comprehend. He wanted to know that she approved of what he was about to do; that she trusted his judgment about is crew, about his ship and about his mission. He had known she did, on some level he had known, but in that moment he was lost without her. She had always been able to give him the calm certainty that the brass had never been able to. She would have been able to tell him to go for it, even with the dangers lurking in the shadows.

He remembered back to that moment, when his breath caught in his throat as he wondered if he would be able to be there for her when her time came. She was only a couple years behind him on the command track, and at the rate she was going, they both knew she would have her own command soon. He had felt more excited for that moment rather than his own moment. She'd be a brilliant captain, he had known even then, but she would face her insecurities the same as him. He had wanted to be able to be there for her, to tell her all the things he desperately wanted her to tell him in that moment; how everything was going to be alright, how worthy she was of this honor, and how confident he was in her abilities. It had been so much easier to say the words to someone else than to believe them himself.

In the end, he hadn't been there for her. He had been far off on the farthest edges of space ever explored by a human being when her ship was launched to follow in his footsteps. He had written her a letter before hand with a note on it telling her not to open it until right before she left. Inside, he had written down each and everything he knew she needed to hear. She told him later that it had taken a lot of effort not to cry when she read it.

In a sense, it was payback. Back during his ceremony, just as he had stepped to the podium, he had found a small scrap of paper waiting next to his prepared speech. He had recognized the small, precise handwriting immediately and had marveled at her incredible ability to know him so well. It had been only a few lines but in that moment, it was perfect. He had held it in his hand and gazed at it before he looked up into the crowd and began.

 _When we were young, this seemed impossible. Now, it is within our grasp._

Jon could feel Erika's concerned gaze on him before he even looked up to meet her eyes.

"I love you."

"I know," she smiled. "I'd like to think that in every reality, in every possible universe, we would have ended up together just like this. Maybe it would have taken us a little longer in some versions. Maybe we would have gotten married sooner in others. But I know that there isn't a single universe out there where I wouldn't be with you." She leaned over and kissed him. "I love you too."

###

"Commander Archer?" Jon looked up from his work to see Forrest walking over with someone following behind him. "I'd like to introduce you to the final member of the NX team. Lieutenant Erika Hernandez, meet Commander Jonathan Archer."

###

And that, as they say, is that! This last one took me way longer than I'd thought it would but I'm really happy with the way it turned out. This is definitely the end of my Jon and Erika saga and for those of you who stuck with me through it all, thank you. And to Bones, none of this would have ever happened without you. Thank you for inspiring me in ways the show never did. Much love, AE.


End file.
